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22 February 2019

Here's how it works: The Recent Releases chart brings together critical reaction to new albums from more than 50 sources worldwide. It's updated daily. Albums qualify with 5 reviews, and drop out after 6 weeks into the longer timespan charts.

Ry Cooder was one of three established artists whose albums earned huge acclaim on release but disappeared from the end-of-year lists

The ADM Top 10 2011

Forget perverse opinions and personal foibles. When it comes to the most acclaimed albums of the year, here's the facts and figures ...

Now everyone's had their fun with the Best Albums of 2011
roundups, it's time to take stock of the cold hard facts of what
really were the most critically-acclaimed albums over the past 12
months.

The Any Decent Music top 20 of 2011 is the most reliable guide
to what earned the most extensive overall praise from reviewers.
It's not skewed by idiosyncratic judgments or personal prejudice or
peer pressure - it's the widest survey of worldwide critical
opinion around, and you can't argue with mathematics.

The majority of the albums in our top 20 were reviewed by
between 30 and 50 of our sources from the UK, US, Canada, Australia
and Ireland, and the formula we apply to arrive at the ADM rating
takes the number of reviews into account. (We also exclude any
albums with fewer than 10 reviews.) We've listed them here with an
extract from one selected review which best sums up the general
reaction to the album.

The most obvious variance from all the end-of-year favourites is
the presence at the top of the ratings of a trio of established
names, Ry Cooder, Tom Waits and Gillian Welch, each of whose albums
earned exceptional praise upon release but disappeared from the
reckoning when it came to looking back on the year's highlights. Of
the three only the Tom Waits album figured in the top 50, and even
then at a comparatively lowly 18.

When the vast majority of the remainder of this list tallies quite
closely with the Best Of lists, it's hard to work out why this
should be, except to hazard a guess that these albums represent yet
more high-quality material from very established artists with a
string of acclaimed releases behind them.

Thus they might not be regarded as landmark albums deserving of
being singled out as high points of the past 12 months in the same
way as albums from less-established (and arguably more
experimental) artists such as Bon Iver or Tune-Yards.

Another notable omission from the Best Of lists is that of the
Earth album, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, which is the
highest-ranked rock album in this list, but did not appear in the
top 50 of the Best Ofs. In this instance this is probably down to
the fact that Earth's doom drone noise appealed to a narrower band
of reviewers who rated it extremely highly (as reflected in its
number of reviews).

That aside, there is no question that this has been PJ Harvey's
year. As well as heading this list and topping the Best Of ratings
by a huge margin, her Let England Shake is at No.3 in our all-time
list (all-time in our world being the three years of our
existence).